navigating the asteroid belt would require a small, nimble spacecraft capable of shooting the really big asteroids into two smaller ones, and so on, until the little tiny asteroids just explode.
That navigation method only works in a universe of closed topology and a radius of a few thousand feet. Unfortunately, our universe is effectively unbounded. The smaller asteroids would escape, leaving the spacecraft with too low a score to reach its destination.
After all, tons of OS developers have a daily job and I am hard pressed to believe they restrain themselves from doing stuff during their working hours.
I'd bet that in at least a few of these cases, the developers are sitting on their asses anyway because their PHBs can't figure out how to manage their projects or even what they want to build. In this situation, writing free software keeps the skills sharp and is more fulfilling than endless games of Minesweeper. (Or reading blitherblather on/.)
A good manager, in contrast, probably would notice if someone was distracted enough by personal projects to be a significant resource drain.
If this keeps up it could be GNU/BSD/GPL/LGPL/YADA/ETC/Linux
How about solving this by creating a fanciful glyph (vaguely 'L' shaped) and allocating a point in the Unicode codespace to replace the name? There would no longer be a spoken name for/The Operating System Formerly Known as (GNU\/)?Linux/.
The Glyph could mean all things to all people. Everyone would be happy enough to resume productive activities.
Hell yeah, I will take that any time over single huge monopoly run by bunch of politicians.
Here's an example of the key difference: Since 1975 the leadeship of the huge government monopoly has changed 5 times. The leadership of the huge software monopoly has changed 0 times.
The government monopoly is supposed to be accountable to each citizen and voter. The software monopoly is supposed to be accountable to each shareholder, in proportion to the shares held. Guess who holds the most shares?
Every student should GPL all of their introductory CS homework. Then, to get real-world experience in open source development, each student should create a project on SourceForge for each of these assignments.
The world will be a much richer place with hundreds of thousands of implementations to choose from of these useful applications: recursive Towers-of-Hanoi, quicksort tests, infix calculator parsers, Tic-Tac-Toe AI games and rudimentery Java-based web servers.
Homework that used to be just thrown away will be wasted no more. No longer will the Linux world be lacking for applications.
... Titanium is about as cheap as aluminum.
Perhaps this would work.
Great. That's all we need: breeding a super
strain of TITANIUM eating fungus. Each of these
fungizoids would have the strength of 10 ordinary
aluminum-eating ones. And the old-fashioned cheese-eating fungus woudln't even have a chance.
With hoards of titanium-clad killer mushrooms terrorizing
the nation, we would need a real superhero to save us.
Here's a better business plan (patent pending): do a deal with M$ and AOL to support entering a raw UPC code into the browser address bar. Any 10-digit number would be assumed to be a UPC (or 15-digit or whatever it is). This gets forwarded to the central spam database and returns the info to the user. Make sure this feature is enabled by default on all browsers.
This would let *more* people use the service from anywhere with almost no capital outlay. The only disadvantage of this plan is that Bill Gates would 0wn you, but that's pretty much true already.
NASA is having problems funding the 'Pluto Express' mission. This could solve the dilemma. They should buy an X-10 camera for $69, pay these guys $3000 to strap it on this thing, and aim it at Pluto. Mission accomplished.
Well, I used/.'s post as 'code' option, but it
still squeezed all the whitespace. I had to tack
on the lowercase 'x' chars to get it through the/.
lameness filter (it thought I was SHOUTING, but
I was really only using 6-bit characters:).
That's easy: get it from the FBI. They've got
Carnivore systems planted all over the Internet
that could snoop out this info. Since it's aggregate
data, no warrant necessary.:-)
C THE ONLY TIME I USED FORTRAN WAS IN HIGH x
C SCHOOL IN ABOUT 1980 ON A PDP-8 WITH A x
100 FORMAT('PUNCH CARD READER. OUR CARD PUNCH') x
110 FORMAT('DIDNT WORK SO WE HAD TO MARK THE') x
120 FORMAT('TEDIOUS PENCIL-MARKED CARDS BY') x
130 FORMAT('HAND. OUR FORTRAN COMPILER WAS') x
140 FORMAT('BROKEN TOO, SO I WROTE A PROGRAM') x
C IN BASIC TO MIMIC THE OUTPUT OF A FORTRAN x
C RUN, INCLUDING JOB CONTROL MESSAGES. I WAS x
C ABOUT THE ONLY PERSON IN MY CLASS x
C TO GET CREDIT ON THE FORTRAN SECTION x
C OF THE COURSE.
C IT LOOKS LIKE SLASHDOT IS MESSING UP MY
C CARD COLUMN FORMAT HERE. THIS PROGRAM
C WON'T LOAD.
SYNTAX ERROR LINE 1 COLUMN 3
ABEND JOB 1343
THU JUN 14, 2001 5:23GMT LPT42X
RUNTIME: 342MS COMPUTING UNITS USED: 7
YOU HAVE 432 UNITS REMAINING IN YOUR ACCOUNT
There are recent news reports that the IP enforcers are going after individuals who host Gnutella servers by putting pressure on their ISPs to disconnect them.
How long before they hire agents to do traffic analysis on the net looking for heavy Freenet usage. Even though they don't know
what's being moved, it must be "bad", or they wouldn't be trying to hide it.
They'll point this out to the users' ISPs, who would in turn threaten to disconnect them. A few well-publicized incidents could prevent Freenet from ever reaching critical mass. So much for the free information utopia.
Pretty soon the price for a movie or a song will be set based upon which state you live in. Then by which city. Ultimatly they will charge each customer the most they are willing to pay.
Hey, this could be an OK deal. Let's say the distributor's advanced customer profiling pinpoints the movies I hate so much that they would have to pay me to watch. (Should be easy, since most current movies fall into this category.)
All I need to do is order up a boatload of these, then I can kick back and pull in some serious coinage from these bozos.
"You log on in the morning and (the computer) gives you two or three options: 'Have you thought about doing one of these things? I've done the calculations for you," Marcyk said.
Just once, I'd like to read an article about a new microprocessor technology that doesn't have some silly quote about what kind of AI feature it will enable.
For decades, hardware has been proving exponentially. For decades, they've been predictiong that the new features will magically enable intelligent software.
All we've got to show for it so far is Clippy the paper clip. A mere 10X speedup won't make Clippy any less annoying.
Hint for futuristic article editors: the human brain has a hardware and software architecture that has absolutely nothing in common with that of an electronic computer.
Why are you evaluating 1994 technology with 2001 eyes?
Because it still ships with most Linux distros. And, unfortunately, I still use it on certain web sites because that's all they test with when they write their HTML.
Netscape's gift to the world was not a browser, but the concept that astounding software could be free.
This is true, if by "astounding" you mean:
Astoundingly tiny, ugly, unreadable fonts.
- or -
Astoundingly strange behaving widgets.
- or -
Astounding waste of screen real-estate with huge, inflexible toolbars.
- or -
Astounding number of bugs patched and repatched until some 4.x release almost works and beomes a mysterious standard of compatibility frozen in time.
Apple had to take out all the Easter eggs in all their mac apps. ... Sure, many Mac users were not happy, but it keeps good Apple employees
Hmmm... I wonder if Apple lost any of their best employees because they weren't allowed to express their creativity (to Think Different, in other words) by coding up a nice Easter egg?
>> Oh... sorry, I forgot... Florida is also the SAME STATE where George W. Bush STOLE the presidency.
> Strange, I though that Florida was the state that Al Gore TRYED TO STEAL the presidency in.
Nope, your both wrong. Florida is the state where the election was arbitrarily decided based on interpretations of statistical noise. The margin of difference was far, far below the capabilities of the polling system in use to unambiguously resolve the intentions of every voter. This is an unfortunate side effect of our electoral college system, which can amplify sampling errors by orders of magnitude.
Given that we do not have enough evidence left from this fiasco to determine what the voters intended, the outcome is necessarilly decided by an arbitrary choice. Neither side has any justifcation for claiming that the election was "stolen". The real victor is as unknowable as Heisenburg's cat's health in a sealed box.
This case turned out like the board game "Risk". The GOP had more "armies" (supreme court justices, etc.) in the relevant territories than the Democrats when the dice were thrown. It may not be ideal, but how else are you going to decide it?
There's a higher law than the DMCA. It's called
the First Amendment. 2600 may violate the DMCA
by hyperlinking, but it doesn't matter because
those sections of the DMCA are invalid, and there is no need
to heed them.
Slashdot Mirror
That navigation method only works in a universe of closed topology and a radius of a few thousand feet. Unfortunately, our universe is effectively unbounded. The smaller asteroids would escape, leaving the spacecraft with too low a score to reach its destination.
I'd bet that in at least a few of these cases, the developers are sitting on their asses anyway because their PHBs can't figure out how to manage their projects or even what they want to build. In this situation, writing free software keeps the skills sharp and is more fulfilling than endless games of Minesweeper. (Or reading blitherblather on /.)
A good manager, in contrast, probably would notice if someone was distracted enough by personal projects to be a significant resource drain.
How about solving this by creating a fanciful glyph (vaguely 'L' shaped) and allocating a point in the Unicode codespace to replace the name? There would no longer be a spoken name for /The Operating System Formerly Known as (GNU\/)?Linux/.
The Glyph could mean all things to all people. Everyone would be happy enough to resume productive activities.
Here's an example of the key difference: Since 1975 the leadeship of the huge government monopoly has changed 5 times. The leadership of the huge software monopoly has changed 0 times.
The government monopoly is supposed to be accountable to each citizen and voter. The software monopoly is supposed to be accountable to each shareholder, in proportion to the shares held. Guess who holds the most shares?
The world will be a much richer place with hundreds of thousands of implementations to choose from of these useful applications: recursive Towers-of-Hanoi, quicksort tests, infix calculator parsers, Tic-Tac-Toe AI games and rudimentery Java-based web servers.
Homework that used to be just thrown away will be wasted no more. No longer will the Linux world be lacking for applications.
Great. That's all we need: breeding a super strain of TITANIUM eating fungus. Each of these fungizoids would have the strength of 10 ordinary aluminum-eating ones. And the old-fashioned cheese-eating fungus woudln't even have a chance.
With hoards of titanium-clad killer mushrooms terrorizing the nation, we would need a real superhero to save us.
This would let *more* people use the service from anywhere with almost no capital outlay. The only disadvantage of this plan is that Bill Gates would 0wn you, but that's pretty much true already.
NASA is having problems funding the 'Pluto Express' mission. This could solve the dilemma. They should buy an X-10 camera for $69, pay these guys $3000 to strap it on this thing, and aim it at Pluto. Mission accomplished.
Well, I used /.'s post as 'code' option, but it
still squeezed all the whitespace. I had to tack
on the lowercase 'x' chars to get it through the /.
lameness filter (it thought I was SHOUTING, but
I was really only using 6-bit characters :).
That's easy: get it from the FBI. They've got Carnivore systems planted all over the Internet that could snoop out this info. Since it's aggregate data, no warrant necessary. :-)
C THE ONLY TIME I USED FORTRAN WAS IN HIGH x
C SCHOOL IN ABOUT 1980 ON A PDP-8 WITH A x
100 FORMAT('PUNCH CARD READER. OUR CARD PUNCH') x
110 FORMAT('DIDNT WORK SO WE HAD TO MARK THE') x
120 FORMAT('TEDIOUS PENCIL-MARKED CARDS BY') x
130 FORMAT('HAND. OUR FORTRAN COMPILER WAS') x
140 FORMAT('BROKEN TOO, SO I WROTE A PROGRAM') x
C IN BASIC TO MIMIC THE OUTPUT OF A FORTRAN x
C RUN, INCLUDING JOB CONTROL MESSAGES. I WAS x
C ABOUT THE ONLY PERSON IN MY CLASS x
C TO GET CREDIT ON THE FORTRAN SECTION x
C OF THE COURSE.
C IT LOOKS LIKE SLASHDOT IS MESSING UP MY
C CARD COLUMN FORMAT HERE. THIS PROGRAM
C WON'T LOAD.
SYNTAX ERROR LINE 1 COLUMN 3
ABEND JOB 1343
THU JUN 14, 2001 5:23GMT LPT42X
RUNTIME: 342MS COMPUTING UNITS USED: 7
YOU HAVE 432 UNITS REMAINING IN YOUR ACCOUNT
On this issue, however, I'd bet they could draft a letter that RMS, Jesse Helms and Ross Perot would all sign. Now that would be something else.
How long before they hire agents to do traffic analysis on the net looking for heavy Freenet usage. Even though they don't know what's being moved, it must be "bad", or they wouldn't be trying to hide it.
They'll point this out to the users' ISPs, who would in turn threaten to disconnect them. A few well-publicized incidents could prevent Freenet from ever reaching critical mass. So much for the free information utopia.
Hey, this could be an OK deal. Let's say the distributor's advanced customer profiling pinpoints the movies I hate so much that they would have to pay me to watch. (Should be easy, since most current movies fall into this category.)
All I need to do is order up a boatload of these, then I can kick back and pull in some serious coinage from these bozos.
Just once, I'd like to read an article about a new microprocessor technology that doesn't have some silly quote about what kind of AI feature it will enable.
For decades, hardware has been proving exponentially. For decades, they've been predictiong that the new features will magically enable intelligent software.
All we've got to show for it so far is Clippy the paper clip. A mere 10X speedup won't make Clippy any less annoying.
Hint for futuristic article editors: the human brain has a hardware and software architecture that has absolutely nothing in common with that of an electronic computer.
Because it still ships with most Linux distros. And, unfortunately, I still use it on certain web sites because that's all they test with when they write their HTML.
This is true, if by "astounding" you mean:
Astoundingly tiny, ugly, unreadable fonts.
- or -
Astoundingly strange behaving widgets.
- or -
Astounding waste of screen real-estate with huge, inflexible toolbars.
- or -
Astounding number of bugs patched and repatched until some 4.x release almost works and beomes a mysterious standard of compatibility frozen in time.
...
Sure, many Mac users were not happy, but it keeps good Apple employees
Hmmm... I wonder if Apple lost any of their best employees because they weren't allowed to express their creativity (to Think Different, in other words) by coding up a nice Easter egg?
How about if you think a movie is blasphemous - do you stay away from it, or do you picket the theatre?
Blasphemous? Sounds interesting. I'll take 2 tix, a large popcorn and two medium drinks, please.
> Strange, I though that Florida was the state that Al Gore TRYED TO STEAL the presidency in.
Nope, your both wrong. Florida is the state where the election was arbitrarily decided based on interpretations of statistical noise. The margin of difference was far, far below the capabilities of the polling system in use to unambiguously resolve the intentions of every voter. This is an unfortunate side effect of our electoral college system, which can amplify sampling errors by orders of magnitude.
Given that we do not have enough evidence left from this fiasco to determine what the voters intended, the outcome is necessarilly decided by an arbitrary choice. Neither side has any justifcation for claiming that the election was "stolen". The real victor is as unknowable as Heisenburg's cat's health in a sealed box.
This case turned out like the board game "Risk". The GOP had more "armies" (supreme court justices, etc.) in the relevant territories than the Democrats when the dice were thrown. It may not be ideal, but how else are you going to decide it?
I've been [ADV: Enjoy Coca Cola!] making a decent [ADV: You'll Love the New Lexus LS430'] living for six months now just by posting [ADV: WASSUUUUPPP!!!!???] micro-ads on public forums.
There's a higher law than the DMCA. It's called the First Amendment. 2600 may violate the DMCA by hyperlinking, but it doesn't matter because those sections of the DMCA are invalid, and there is no need to heed them.
I called the cable co., and I had 1Mb/sec bandwidth the following Tuesday. Its been working great for over a year.
Funny thing is, I wouldn't have considered a cable modem before this episode because it seemed like a kludge. Live and learn.
Which is kind of ironic, since there seems to be a lack of Free (TM) voice recognition software out there.